Vacations: the videopoem

What do we vacate when we go on vacation? What do we re-create when we engage in recreation? Here are four one-line poems (AKA monostiches) about summer vacation activities which may or may not answer these questions. One thing is certain, though: a bear in a berry patch knows exactly what she’s doing.

Process notes

Saturday’s collection of six one-line poems, “What we did on our summer vacations,” was a blog post of last resort. I’d actually spent much of the day trying to figure out how to make a video for the whale-watching piece, which I’d drafted as a haiku on Twitter the day before. I looked at a ton of free-to-use footage on the web, but didn’t see anything I liked, so finally I got the idea of writing some thematically linked monostiches instead. This turned out, of course, to make an excellent blog post, because so many of you responded by leaving one-line vacation poems of your own in the comments. I love it when that happens.

At mid-morning on Sunday, we got a real downpour, and I went out on my porch to shoot some video. When I looked at the results on Monday, I noticed a couple of interesting things. One is that I had unknowingly captured a box turtle struggling to cross the torrents of water in the road, and narrowly missing getting crushed by the tires of our neighbor’s truck. I was simply shooting the road without, obviously, paying a great deal of attention to what was in the viewfinder screen. This footage doesn’t appear in the above video, for the simple reason that I couldn’t make it fit, but it says something about my level of attentiveness while filming, I think. I did use two other pieces of front-porch rainstorm footage, however, one of them for the original one-liner about whale-watching.

I’ve always preferred the text-only approach to videopoetry when making haiku videos, and that seemed like the best approach this time, too. I was constrained in which poems I could use, because I wanted each to fit on a single line at a legible font-size. I thought about using a musical soundtrack to give the video a unified feel, but it seemed important instead to use found sound — and I got lucky, because someone on freesound.org had uploaded a recording of whale vocalizations made while SCUBA diving in the Pacific. I don’t know if they’re humpbacks or not, but what the heck. To keep the video from growing too long, I made each sound sample exactly 15 seconds long, and trimmed the video to match.

Thanks to the frequent crashes of my woefully inadequate video-editing software (Adobe Premiere Elements 7), I wasn’t able to save the project in a form suitable for uploading last night. This turns out to have been a good thing, because this morning I got the idea of adding some extra footage after each segment, which had the effect I think of giving each poem more breathing room, and also suggesting another interpretative dimension. A video that last night struck me as kind of hum-drum now seems to have the requisite pizzazz — though granted, my standards are fairly low. As for the content of that extra, unifying footage: it was a toss-up between a black bear and a millipede. The bear won.

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Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).

2 Comments

Very enjoyable! The bear makes a great emcee. I really like how you have the poem fade over the video while the video’s sound continues. My only suggestion involves the amount of time to read: I had to race to take in the excellent poems themselves before they faded away. (Or maybe I’m a slow reader at the sentence level, too . . .)